By Taylor Freeman

Who is The Finisher, and why is he in the newspaper? Well, let me tell you about The Finisher and how he broke into my house one night.

It was a great night. I had just gotten home with my boyfriend Greg after a night of bowling with the family. We arrived home at around 1, and went to bed at around 1:30 after letting our dog out. Something woke me up not too long after we went to bed. I wasn’t sure what it was, mainly because I don’t normally wake up for no reason in the middle of the night. But I dismissed it as just the cat and I went back to sleep.

All was well until I heard the sound of Heidi barking. I thought it was part of a dream, but I wish it was. Heidi wasn’t the dog who was barking, there was a strange dog barking viciously at something. Then my brain started to recognize male voices yelling. At first I thought they were outside of the apartment, but they were too loud and clear to be coming through closed windows. At this point both Greg and Heidi are up. Heidi starts barking, almost confused like.

Being the stereotypical scared damsel I was, I told my boyfriend to check what was going on while I held Heidi. He got up and closed the door behind him some. I sat in my own silence as the screaming continued, holding my dog in an attempt to calm her. She was shaking as bad as I was. Finally Greg came back. There were four cops in my house, three of whom were pinning a strange man to the ground and the fourth holding a police dog. After a few minutes, the noise stopped, but I don’t remember hearing the noise die down. Greg got up again and left the room. Heidi, being a daddy’s girl, wasn’t having any of that, whining and growling until he got back. When he did, he told me that there was a cop who wanted to get our statements, since we were there when he broke into the house.

Now, before I continue, my apartment is on the first floor of the house. It’s literally a three-section line: from the front of the house there’s the gaming room with the front door, then the living room as the middle section, which our bedroom branches off of, and then the kitchen, to the right of which is the bathroom and our roommate’s room. Beyond the kitchen is the side door that leads to the driveway. Fortunately our roommate was off on a trip at the time. We also have a baby gate sectioning off the living room and the gaming room so Heidi doesn’t get into things that she isn’t supposed to.

Getting back to the story, the cop, Ross, first asked if there was anything broken or missing from the house. From what we could tell, only the baby gate was taken off. It didn’t look like he took anything, but if he did, it clearly wasn’t important enough to remember. He asked then if there was anything in here that wasn’t ours. I gave them a hat I didn’t recognize, being the only person in the household that wears hats, and a flask that was in the corner. Officer Ross had another one of his cop buddies take the flask out of the house, and he prepared some paper on a clipboard.

Greg spoke up and asked the real question: What the hell happened? According to Officer Ross, this guy had been wreaking havoc all along our street. Kicking in windows, pushing over the motorcycles next door and just genuinely being a nuisance. The cops had been tailing this guy, waiting for the right moment to catch him, when he found our doors, which happened to be unlocked. Apparently when we took the dog out when we got home, we forgot to lock the doors.

Officer Ross said that the man made his way from the gaming room to the kitchen, saw cops waiting for him around back, and turned back to the gaming room to hunker down until they went away. That’s when the cops entered with the K-9 unit and pounced this guy. Ross said that he was probably under the influence of some type of drug, and with that flask I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on drugs and intoxicated, too.

Ross was finishing up the story when another officer came back in and asked to pull him aside for a moment. Greg and I stood there in silence for a short while. He went to go make sure nothing was stolen, and I just stood in the gaming room with our anxious puppy. That’s when I heard the most cliche evil laugh. Looking out my window I see the guy who broke into my house being carried into the back of an ambulance, strapped down onto a stretcher, laughing maniacally.

Finally Officer Ross both came back and we gave him our statement — that we were in the house when this occurred, we had just gotten back from bowling, and mind you, this all started at 3:30 a.m. Only two hours after having gone to bed. If I had gotten up and checked the house when I woke up, things could have ended much worse than just having some drugged-up lunatic hunker down in the room with all of our valuables. After we’d given our statement and everything quieted down, there was no way of getting to sleep after that.

The next day I met my neighbor outside and they asked what had happened. They thought all the yelling was Greg and I arguing. I told them what had happened. They were glad we were all okay. Then they told me about a guy running around in our front yard without his shirt on, screaming “I’m the Finisher, I’m the Finisher!” This made the drug theory all the more reasonable. Needless to say, we’ve been locking our doors every night; even during the day, even when we are home and awake.